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Another Tack: The chicken or the egg?

The flag of the German-American Bund, where the swastika is featured unabashedly.

Britain is gobsmacked. Its TV screens feature seemingly stricken Muslim parents, from urban hubs like Cardiff, denying any responsibility for or knowledge of their sons’ escapades in bleeding Syria.

Their moaning is indispensable to a novel storyline that’s fast gaining resonance in Europe’s insincere political-correctness and Orwellian Newspeak. It’s subtle but nevertheless significant. It’s about “Europeans who have been to Syria,” have emerged therefrom somehow tainted with extremism and might thereby become, a tad unexpectedly, dangerous.

Yes, a newfangled brand of terrorist seems to have suddenly surfaced in Europe’s pleasant lands but polished European manners prohibit us from characterizing him as Arab or Muslim.

That kind of serves to clear the numerous Islamic radicals who proliferate throughout the continent. The problem has thus been instantly dwarfed and quasi-sanitized. It involves only specific numbers of Syrian civil war combatants/veterans, now identified broadmindedly only by whichever European passport they carry.

Hence, conforming intuitively to the latest PC diktats, news outlets worldwide had reported that the attack on the Brussels Jewish Museum was perpetrated by “a Frenchman.” Presumably all regurgitating the identical text, correspondents everywhere couldn’t as much as get the victim-count right.

But who cares about dead Jews? It’s the rights of living Muslims that postmodern multiculturalism must uphold.

And so the perpetrator was described solely as French – not as an ethnic Arab with dual Algerian and French citizenship. Europe’s escalating Islamic fanaticism is expediently skipped over, disregarded, perhaps even imperceptibly camouflaged and condoned.

We’re left with just one niggling, nettlesome, negligible unresolved question. What impels supposed generic Europeans go to Syria in the first place? What motivates their voluntary exposure to jihadist zealotry? If Europe’s expanding and increasingly aggressive Muslim presence is to be cleansed of any hint of culpability, we need to know what prompted unconscripted young men to enlist in the service of a holy war far away.

Without exerting indolent postmodern intellects too excessively, it ought to be readily recognized that we face a classic chicken or the egg dilemma here. Did Syria radicalize Muslims from Europe or did they head for Syria precisely because they were radical to begin with?

The blame-it-on-Syria copout is simply too facile for serious consideration. It fits hand in glove with the inclination to shower abundant moral-relativist goodwill on all cultures and religions. It behooves freethinking progressive sorts to regard them all – especially those exuding third world allure – with humanitarian tolerance, no matter how much intolerance and inhumanity some creeds radiate.

Focusing on the visceral hate they disseminate is illiberal and therefore not to be countenanced in respectable society.

The West doesn’t merely limit its vision with self-applied blinkers. It puts on the psychosocial equivalent of virtual-reality eyewear that immerses the mind in an imaginary reality. Sensory and empirical evidence becomes irrelevant. We can, for example, view the Arab world’s internecine slaughter as a grassroots uprising. We can arbitrarily choose sides (as in a computer game) and decide without any context (and often in flagrant defiance of context) who’s good and who’s bad.

With such goggles, westerners engrossed themselves in their own multimedia simulations and concluded that an Arab Spring had blossomed forth. Its offshoots included the Syrian conflict between all-around evil combatants. The Arab world, the chanted mantra reiterated, is ripe for democratization. It’s the people’s will. Predictably, dissenting evaluations were denigrated as mean-spirited nay-saying.

Now of course it suits the same one-dimensional opinion-molders to point to Syria’s supposed insurgents as the source of a surprising contagion sweeping over Europe, for which Europeans have nothing to atone.

This is part and parcel of the aforementioned facile copout. All the indicators were right there, in plain sight but European eyes refused to zoom in.

Muslim atrocities on Europe’s soil preceded the flocking of European-resident Arabs/Muslims to jihad’s cause in Syria. The high priests of PC frown on our connecting the dots of all these incidents, but let’s violate their niceties and recall the bombings of public transit in Madrid (2004) and London (2005), the 2004 assassination of Theo van Gogh, the 2006 abduction and murder by sadistic torture of Ilan Halimi, the riots triggered by a Danish cartoon, the Paris rampages and the near-beheading of a British soldier a year ago in the heart of the British capital to the shrieked battle-cry of alahu akhbar.

There’s plenty more but none of it can be ascribed to the Syrian infestation – not even the callous shooting of a Jewish teacher, his two toddler sons and a small girl at Toulouse’s Jewish school two years ago.

That said, all this and the noxious incitement in all too many mosques all across Europe aren’t disconnected from Syria and the big picture of the misnamed Arab Spring.

Had Europeans not averted their pluralist gaze from Muslim belligerence on their own turf, they’d have grasped that Western indulgence and enlightened refinement cannot be replicated on the Arab/Muslim scene. At play are antithetical mindsets – diametric and irreconcilable opposites.

It was tempting to claim that Arabs and other Muslims would naturally espouse democracy had they only been freed from oppression. It’s still tempting to ascribe all the many ills in Arab societies to the evil of despots like Bashar Assad, Muammar Gaddafi and even to the much milder Hosni Mubarak. But if that were so, why is there no democratic ethos among the host of Arab/Muslim communities that burgeon in even the unlikeliest corners of Western Europe?

According to trendy tenets, being removed from tyranny and surrounded by civil liberties, the migrants and their descendents would see the light and, unshackled, would move away from xenophobia and world-domination ambitions.

Not only has this not occurred but the reverse has taken hold. This gives the lie to notions that lack of democracy in the Arab world dooms it to benighted brutality. This is as patently false as were claims that Germans had been coerced to do the Nazis’ bidding. In fact they enthusiastically supported Hitler even from afar, even from where they were ostensibly safe from his predations.

Transplanted Germans promoted Nazism voluntarily and wholeheartedly in the Templar colonies of pre-state Israel even during WWII. Eventually the British Mandate authorities had no choice but to deport all the local-born Germans to Australia because they actively subverted the Allied war effort and abetted the Third Reich enemy.

Among their undertakings was providing munitions and Nazi finances to Haj Amin al-Husseini in order to bolster and bankroll his “great Arab Revolt” of 1936-39. He later spent most of WWII as Hitler’s personal guest in Berlin where he recruited Muslim SS volunteers, cheered on the Holocaust and made sure that Hungarian Jewry would not be spared even in the war’s last months.

A similar scenario unfolded in the US, where newcomers from Germany (significantly allowed into America, while refugee Jews running for their lives were barred) organized in the pro-Nazi Bund, disseminated propaganda (virulently anti-Semitic), held marches and sponsored anti-Jewish boycotts on American soil. They were Nazis with American citizenship.

In 1933 German Nazi Party member Heinz Spanknöbel merged two forerunner outfits in America – Gau-USA and the Free Society of Teutonia – into The Friends of New Germany. This was done with the explicit support of Nazi Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess and the German consul in New York. The FBI regarded the Friends as a Nazi front. It was popular among German-Americans and hardly constituted a no-account curio. In time Spanknöbel was deported back to Germany.

Then, in March 1936, the AV – German American Bund (Amerikadeutscher Volksbund) was set up in Buffalo, NY to win hearts for Nazi Germany. It elected a German-born American Fritz Julius Kuhn as its chief (Bundesführer). Concurrently, the Bund established 24 training camps throughout the US, including Camp Nordland in Andover, NJ; Camp Bergwald, in Bloomingdale, N.J.; Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, NY; Camp Highland in Windham, NY; Camp Von Steuben in Danbury Connecticut and Camp Hindenburg in Grafton Wisconsin.

The Bund held rallies with Nazi insignia and rituals such as the Hitler salute. It lashed out against President Roosevelt, Jewish associations, Communists, “Moscow-lackey” trade unions and American boycotts of German goods. The Bund claimed loyalty to America, which was cynically expressed by hoisting the Stars and Stripes at Bund events and celebrating George Washington as “the first Fascist.”

Kuhn and fellow Bundhotshotsattended the 1936 Summer Olympics in Germany. That afforded Kuhn the opportunity to tour the Reich Chancellery, where he posed for photo-ops with Hitler.

The German American Bund parade on NYC’s East 86th St. on October 30, 1939. Note the SS-like uniforms and Third Reich and Bund flags ahead of the American ones

The pinnacle of Bund success was its February 20, 1939 extravaganza at Madison Square Garden. No less than 40,000 German-American supporters cheered exultantly as Kuhn lambasted FDR, referring to him throughout as “Frank D. Rosenfeld,” dubbing his New Deal the “Jew Deal,” and shouting at the top of his lungs that America was under a Bolshevik-Jewish thumb.

Following the Nazi Party’s own regional administrative subdivisions, the Bund carved up the US into the three Gaue (regions): Gau Ost (East), Gau West, and Gau Midwest. Together these three had 69 Ortsgruppen (local subgroups).Gau Ost alone had 40 (17of them in New York), Gau West had 10 and Gau Midwest 19. Each Gau had its own leader, a Gauleiter as per Nazi parlance, and staff to oversee Bund activities in keeping with the Führerprinzip(Hitler’s principles).

Such avid support for Nazism in both British and American domains decisively debunks the deception of dictatorial coercion to collaborate. Again it’s the chicken or the egg. Did storm troopers terrorize Germans into compliance or did Germans create the Nazi monster?

Are Arabs/Muslims terrorized by their tyrants or did they create these monstrous tyrannies?

The answer can only be sought in situations where the purportedly coerced collaborators are free from coercion. Their behavior in democratic settings is the touchstone. It’s the ultimate test and today’s Muslim populations in Europe – like their German counterparts in pre-state Israel and in prewar America – plainly don’t pass the test. In fact, they flunk it with flying colors.

Calling them “Europeans who have been to Syria” doesn’t change this one jot.

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9 thoughts on “Another Tack: The chicken or the egg?”

So Britain is “gobsmacked” at the populations inability to decipher or handle the wailings and denouncements from Muslim Brits whose relatives and children are fighting the Islamic Ayrab “good fight”. The feigned surprise and breast beating of these “new Brits” at the actions of their BRITISH offspring – and in in time honoured typical `british fashion tried to excuse it with nebulous double entendre actions and words.
If ever there was a scenario where a people have brought it upon themselves – this is it. Over 30 years ago when Professor Enoch Powell warned of the consequences of mass immigration and implied intransigence by said immigrants, he was hounded and berated for his farsightedness. The politically correct liberal lefty socialists were baying for his blood. Now it seems that alas his premonitions are beginning to come home to roost.
And what do we appear to have in Britain at present? A government incapable of strong and decisive decisions, a society beholding to Euro Human Rights Laws that exceed their initial intentions, and restrict the administering of appropriate sentences for crimes committed. A police force whose popularity seems to be at an all time low and with little respect from the general populous. An education policy that is flawed and not fit for purpose, an immigration and social policy that would appear to favour and give to those that take from society, instead of honouring and rewarding those that pay for its upkeep and continuance. And finally a society with little moral respect or fibre or tolerance for others.
No wonder these Muslim reprobates and rebels play up and cause havoc both at home and abroad – and it shouldn’t be a surprise to any true Brit.

These young Muslims can in no way be described as Europeans, ask them and they will deny being English or French or even American. No they are what their parents are, what their ancestors are, but first and foremost they are Muslim. They owe allegiance to no country only to Islam. This Holy War is not far away to them, it surrounds them wherever they are, perhaps most of all when they are in the midst of their enemies in Europe or America. They leave for places like Iraq to fight in order to unite the Muslim world by forcing upon it a unified leadership, devoted to the final triumph of Islam over every other way of thought and behaviour. Their next war will be against Europe. There is no place for freedom and democracy under Islam for Islam is one thing and one thing only, blind obedience to the will of Allah as set out in the rules laid down by Mohammed. And Islam is the product of a brutal tyrannic culture.

Wow! Sarah, you bring up the past of Nazism in America in the 1930s.. I was a kid (born in 1926) living in Minneapolis, MN) How I remember the Gerald L.K. Smith days in Glendale, CA where ‘whites onlyl’ and ‘no Jews allowed’ was prevelant in that suberb city of LA….and the father Charles Coughlin days of spewing antisemitism, and the ‘brown shirts nazis’ in the east…and, on and on, with the ‘polish bullies’ coming into the Jewish neighborhoods, fighting with the Jewish kids..Your article today is an important reminder to ‘never forget’ what rampant antisemitism is all about. Europe and the UK are ‘just about done’ with their democracies. Unfortunate democratic riddance for them, and worlds freedom!…Also, an important reminder that Jewish parents and Jewish voters should ‘view the past’ about antisemitism and its cancerous roots continuing to be nourished by those who would dream of ‘destroying Jews, notwithstanding anywhere they live! Sarah, your ‘regurgitated’ past histories are very important as reminders of those ‘MOTs’ who think is ‘can’t happen again’….Even in the United States of America!

You are ABSOLUTELY right dear Sarah !
Thank you also, for your priceless history lesson.

We all remember, that 9/11 was partially planned in Germany, Mohammad Atta and the Hamburg cell spearheaded the assault.
Any apologies coming from Germany…?
NOT A SINGLE ONE.
A question always lingers in my mind…WHY had there never been a Muzzie attack in Germany…?
The real Nazis and the Arab Nazis have found together, Hitler and al-Husseini had been soul mates and that is, why Germany and the Arabs and also Irans Nazi mullahs will always have warm feelings for one another.

I guess everyone has seen the film of the Hindenburg exploding in New Jersey and the reporter in tears over the humanity of it. The next day the dead Germans were laid out for a memorial service, the coffins draped in swastika flags as 10,000 Americans paid their respects to the dead by passing by and all giving the Nazi salute. You say you never saw that part of the newsreel? It was filmed but became too embarrassing. This occurred in, at the time, a very remote part of Jersey, 10,000 mourners was quite a number

Thank you, Sarah, for your comprehensive analysis of the spread of Islamic jihad over Europe and America and its similarities and connections to the spread of Naziism. It is frightening that, rather than this being the generally accepted viewpoint, the vast majority of people absolutely refuse to see what is clearly right in front of them. Of course, the same is true for Israel and the the Jews’ inalienable rights to all of her land as well as the right to defend herself from the terrorism of her sworn enemies who are bent on her destruction yet Israel’s “friends” constantly see her efforts as evil and the Arabs’ horrific acts as justified if they are noted at all.

Everyone seems to be wondering why Muslims are so quick to commit suicide and slaughter others

Lets have a look at the evidence:
– No Christmas - No television - No nude women - No football - No pork chops - No hot dogs - No burgers - No beer - No bacon - Rags for clothes - Towels for hats - Constant wailing from a tower - More than one wife - More than one mother in law - You can’t shave - Your wife can’t shave - Your wife is picked by someone else for you Then they tell you that “when you die, it all gets better”?? It’s not like it could get much worse

They are not happy in Gaza .. They’re not happy in Egypt .. They’re not happy in Libya .. They’re not happy in Morocco .. They’re not happy in Iran .. They’re not happy in Iraq .. They’re not happy in Yemen .. They’re not happy in Afghanistan .. They’re not happy in Pakistan .. They’re not happy in Syria .. They’re not happy in Lebanon ..
not happy in Mali…in Nigeria…in the Philippines…

SO, WHERE ARE THEY HAPPY?

They’re happy in Australia . They’re happy in Canada . They’re happy in England .. They’re happy in France .. They’re happy in Italy .. They’re happy in Germany .. They’re happy in Sweden .. They’re happy in the USA .. They’re happy in Norway .. They’re happy in Holland . They’re happy in Denmark .
Basically, they’re happy in every country that is not Muslim and unhappy in every country that is!
AND WHO DO THEY BLAME?
Not Islam. Not their leadership. Not themselves.
THEY BLAME THE COUNTRIES THEY ARE HAPPY IN!
AND THEN; They want to change those countries to be like….
THE COUNTRY THEY CAME FROM WHERE THEY WERE UNHAPPY!